While I was working on a recent project that utilized a low tick_lag with some rather large resources (images, sound fx, music, etc), I've noticed that DreamSeeker hangs for a split second before the larger images come into view, or before a sound file is played.

These intermittent hangups are annoying and unexpected, especially when the game is single-player.

It would be nice if all that loading could be done at the beginning of the game, and not right before the asset is sent to the player.

I can probably work around them for now, by sending all assets to the player before the game begins (at 0 volume and assets hidden below a black loading screen, for example), but a simple world variable would be nice.

You can change the value of preload_rsc so that dynamic resources are forcibly loaded, which should eliminate most of the problem. If the issue is happenign even for cases where resources haven't been downloaded yet though, then probably the issue is that the icon is being loaded into the internal image buffers for the first time, which may not be trivial to improve on.

For sound files those have actually already been downloaded though, and what you're hearing is the delay in the sound engine for loading them up. This has improved from past versions a bit but it could probably stand to improve further.